Ideas In Action

By Jennifer Kiilerich and Krystal Schmidt On a rainy November afternoon in a North Nashville classroom, students who once struggled in math periodically shouted out “zearned it,” receiving stickers or candy from their teacher as they hit milestones in the math program of the same name.  Sherrilyn Dovi,… Read More

Three Metro Nashville Public Schools students from the School for Science and Math at Vanderbilt’s (SSMV) senior class have been named as Top 300 Scholars in the Regeneron Science Talent Search 2026 competition. This competition recognizes and empowers the nation’s most promising young scientists who are creating ideas and solutions… Read More

Education Week has released the 2026 Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings, an annual list of education researchers who have demonstrated the greatest influence over educational policy and practice. Four researchers from Vanderbilt Peabody College of education and human development are among the 200 who made the rankings. That places them in the top… Read More

By Jennifer Kiilerich On a gray, blustery December day in Nashville, students piled coats and bags into the corner of a bright, windowed classroom inside Vanderbilt Peabody College’s Six Magnolia Circle. Lively chatter, applause and words of support bounced around the room, and holiday cookies lined a table by… Read More

Warren Lowell (Vanderbilt University) Warren Lowell joined the faculty at Vanderbilt Peabody College of education and human development as an assistant professor in fall 2025. He is an urban sociologist, population scientist and public policy scholar whose work focuses on housing, internal migration and child well-being. He studies… Read More

By Jenna Somers Almost anyone who starts a new job reads training and policy documents as part of an on-boarding process. They might peruse the assigned reading to check the right boxes, but how much are they really learning in the process? How can employers verify learning from training materials… Read More

Funding renewals from major philanthropic organizations will strengthen operations and research efforts aimed at improving outcomes for young children and families.   Press Contact: Sydne Lewis, 615-343-9946, sydne.lewis@vanderbilt.edu The Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center at Vanderbilt University Peabody College of education and human development celebrates the most recent renewed financial… Read More

How do smartphones affect the brains of teenagers? That question is at the core of a new grant awarded to the School for Science and Math at Vanderbilt (SSMV) by the Dana Foundation, which works to advance neuroscience in alignment with community values and societal priorities. Menton Deweese, director… Read More

By Jennifer Kiilerich Golnaz Arastoopour Irgens When Vanderbilt researcher Golnaz Arastoopour Irgens learned about a new all-girls secondary school, located not far from Vanderbilt University, she quickly saw how its mission aligned with her own work. She set about fostering a collaboration that would connect young learners to her… Read More

By Jenna Somers In daily conversations, most people are not aware of the complex brain processes taking place that make their conversations possible. However, understanding these processes could improve how AI communicates with people and how students learn at school. A new study aims to shed light on these processes,… Read More

By Jennifer Kiilerich In a game-changing partnership, Vanderbilt Peabody College of education and human development and the YMCA of Middle Tennessee are proving that effective reading interventions can come in all shapes—and ages. Reading Buddies is a peer-to-peer tutoring initiative spearheaded by Peabody researcher Jeanne Wanzek and Elizabeth… Read More

Andrew Nalani Andrew Nalani, assistant professor of human and organizational development, has joined the Bezos Family Foundation as an inaugural scholar of the Jackie Bezos Researcher in Residence program. Nalani began the one-year residency program on August 18, taking a leave of absence from his faculty position… Read More

By Jenna Somers   Families interested in enrolling their children in this study should contact the research team at vuhandsonplaylab@gmail.com or (615) 343-1079. Down syndrome, the most common chromosomal cause of cognitive disability, affects approximately one in 700 live births. Scientists have known the genetic etiology of Down syndrome for… Read More

By Jenna Somers About a quarter to a third of students with mathematics learning disabilities do not show adequate improvement after receiving skills-based math interventions. A new study will test the effects of combining a mathematics intervention and working memory training on the math learning of first-grade children with… Read More

Policies adopted by states drive major differences in the resources available to families.   The first three years of life are critical for healthy development, yet families in some states have more than twice the resources of those in others—a gap created by state policy choices. Consider a single mother… Read More

By Jennifer Kiilerich Generative AI is ubiquitous these days, but its use tends to raise as many questions—from practical to ethical—as it answers. A Vanderbilt website launched this spring, the Peabody Hub for Mindful AI Innovation, provides a space for users to take a breath and… Read More

By Jenna Somers After a hard day of work, a parent reading a bedtime story to their child might feel too tired and stressed to think of questions that could spark insightful conversations about the story with their child. But these conversations—which scholars call dialogic reading—are critical to literacy development. Read More

By Jenna Somers Key Takeaways Researchers uncovered new personality traits and developed a new personality hierarchy using novel data science methods in taxonomic graph analysis (TGA). TGA could lead to a more precise understanding of personality and classifications in psychopathology. The researchers’ TGA method builds personality hierarchies from the bottom… Read More